Asia Pacific

Just how different is an East Asian society from the West when it comes to working longer before retiring? Data released by both the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the labour and employment ministry in South Korea earlier this year paints a striking picture. According to Korean media, statistics showed South Koreans are working longer than their counterparts in 34 industrialized countries. The Korean Labor Institute said in July the country was the only OECD nation with an average retirement age over 70 between 2007 and 2012; the figure for South Korea, the report said was 71.1. In comparison, the OECD average was 64.3 during the same period.

Asia-Pacific

In a surprisingly tranquil corner of Seoul’s bustling Gangnam district, South Korea’s traditional corporation-dominant economy is quietly transforming to a more dynamic and innovative model. It is here, hidden in one of Asia’s wealthiest commercial neighbourhoods, that the country’s first technology start-up accelerator — dubbed TIPS Town by officials — launched in 2013 in an attempt to inject innovative, ground-up ideas into an economy long dominated by huge, family-run conglomerates known as chaebols.

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For Canadians, one of the most controversial aspects of the newly minted Trans-Pacific Partnership is undoubtedly its impact on the auto industry. The response from autoworkers’ union Unifor was swift. A statement from national president Jerry Dias came within hours of the announcement of the TPP agreement two weeks ago, and put the phasing-out of Canada’s 6.1-per-cent auto-import tariff at the centre of a potential loss of 20,000 jobs.

Is Tom Mulcair right? Should health care become a major issue in the federal election campaign. After all, it always ranks as a high priority among the public. Nonetheless, the Stephen Harper government has always regarded health as a provincial matter, and has altered how the Canada Health Transfer will be allocated to the provinces, so that those with less resource-based revenue, or those with a higher percentage of older, immigrant, or aboriginal populations will suffer. At present, despite annual increases of six per cent, Ottawa fails to provide the 25 per cent of health costs as suggested by Roy Romanow.

On a brilliant fall night, they had filed into Vancouver’s City Hall, filling the 250 chairs set up off the lobby. Another hundred or so latecomers trudged up the stairs to the third-floor overflow room. They didn’t come to protest or complain Tuesday. They came ready to help. They came looking for someone to tell them how best to open their hearts, wallets and even homes to Syrian refugees.

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century has attracted worldwide attention not because he crusades against inequality — many of us do that — but because of its central thesis, based on his reading of the 19th and 20th centuries: that capital “mechanically produces arbitrary, unsustainable inequalities” inevitably leading the world to misery, violence and wars and will continue to do so in this century.

Can NATO governments trust one of their members during the current fighting against Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria? It’s a question some — including the Stephern Harper government — would do well to ponder following recent developments in the Middle East where NATO member states, including Canada, find themselves increasingly involved in a conflict in which the true long-term objectives of some of those involved in the current fighting, including NATO member Turkey, are far from clear or, in some cases, in conflict with the goals of other supposed allies.

It's days like Monday that reassure Tony Hann he was right to avoid stocks in mainland China.
The severity of an 8.5 percent drop in the Shanghai Composite Index is bad enough, but what irks him the most is not knowing why it tumbled so much.

Few countries enjoy as long a history of friendship and shared endeavour as Canada and Australia. It is not by chance it was to Sydney, in 1895, that Canada dispatched its first trade commissioner, nor that Australia entered into diplomatic relations with Canada over 75 years ago, at virtually the same time as with the United States.

British Columbia has extensive historical, cultural and economic ties to Asia. Consider that about 28 per cent of Metro Vancouver’s population is of East or southeast Asian origin. Ethnic Chinese, who account for 17 per cent of the people living in Metro Vancouver, have been a fixture in B.C. since the first wave of immigration was triggered by the gold rush in the mid-1850s.

In a laboratory deep in the heart of the UBC campus, a group of researchers are breaking seemingly normal concrete blocks with high-tech equipment, pulling, twisting and dropping them, again and again. These grey blocks, some as small as a Rubik’s Cube and others as large as a section of a bridge deck, fill the warehouse-sized facility within UBC’s applied sciences quarter.

Four former senior officials from four separate provinces — including three former provincial ministers — said the visibility of Canada’s financial and trade prowess in global markets leaves much to be desired, and policy and business leaders need to push the “Canada Brand” more aggressively abroad to make up the gap. The group was speaking Tuesday at the Pacific Finance & Trade Summit at the Vancouver Convention Centre. The panel, which included former B.C. finance minister Colin Hansen, told a crowd of 200 attendees that while Canada’s banking stability and expertise are respected worldwide, the recognition it receives globally isn’t proportional to its merits.

In signing a much-awaited memorandum of understanding and two major agreements with Pacific NorthWest LNG on May 20, the British Columbia government made good its promised support for the company’s proposed project to produce liquefied natural gas in northern B.C. for export to Asia.

It truly is a unique site. For some, it’s a dangerous development, capable of unleashing further friction in a region already wracked by growing tension. For there, in the South China Sea, an enormous flotilla of Chinese ocean dredges have been creating an artificial island where no island previously existed.

Premier Christy Clark and her B.C. Liberals are going all-in to develop liquefied natural gas, agreeing to lock in provincial royalties, taxes and regulations for decades in an effort to persuade a Malaysian-led consortium to invest billions in B.C. The first of those agreements was signed in Vancouver Wednesday by natural gas minister Rich Coleman and a representative of the Pacific NorthWest LNG consortium and released at a press conference afterward.

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